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FLASH FICTION: The Crumbling

As I’m not sure how much longer I will be on this Earth, I have chosen to begin to share my thoughts on our world with everyone for posterity. I am merely a man, not a deity, and certainly not the voice of authority. Take what I say for what it’s worth, for it is written with the intent of a teacher’s heart.

I learned a long time again that people are naturally cruel to each other. We focus more on being mean and unkind to each other than anything else. I suppose that cannot be avoided. After all, humanity has spent only a few hundred thousand years behaving like a pack of wild animals without any sort of notion of decency. We put others into bondage who don’t look or act like us, we create excuses for our behavior based on careful selection of words from so-called “sacred texts,” which have been cobbled together like a patchwork quilt; their contents regarded as sacred based on the whim of the moment rather than the acknowledgement of cosmic truths. We have, as a species, grown ever more foolish in our behavior and how we justify said behavior.

Humanity, as a whole, is a failed experiment in summoning the powers of the spirit realm for physical pleasure and dubious uses of power. Today, we are but a shadow of what we once were. Our people were once great, a civilization unmatched, then lost. It was our own hubris which allowed this to happen, and it is something we must never again be allowed to repeat. Those who have come to save us from ourselves must be embraced. They do not come with malicious intent; only to take into their arms and their world the best of ours. The animals, the plants, the fish, the cures for disease and those of us who have chosen to follow a better way and brighter path.

Our arrogance did not allow us to see that our world was not dying, but already dead. The worlds which had come together to help evacuate our planet only allowed those who understood to join them. The rest were sentenced to die, the final price to be paid for the ultimate human sin – the sin of pride.

I watch out the window as all the great things in our world are collected, scooped up with care like infants in a nursery being spirited away before a tornado destroys it all. They are part of our fleet now; ten thousand ships ready to take us to a new world. The Bible calls it a “new earth;” but I know better. It is not new, but our origin, where it all came from. This new world is actually the old; we are now at the end of the revolution and have reached the point where we must take ourselves into the beyond that lies in the darkness. It may take us a thousand centuries, but we must reach our new home.

Seconds later, it’s all gone and all that is left is the planet I once called home. A tiny flash of light is sent hurtling towards the ocean and, moments later, I watch as the planet crumbles. The oceans become vapor, the clouds dissipate, and flashes on the ground could be seen as weapons, bombs and fuel lines all erupt in flames. The planet is collapsing from the inside out and, soon after, breaks apart like a stale cake left out in the sun. We move away slowly, and a flash is sent towards the moon, which crumbles as well. It was quite anti-climactic, really. Old films I had watched from centuries ago portrayed the Earth and moon as exploding in a spectacular flash of light akin to billions of fusion warheads. Instead, my former home world fell apart much the way a house of cards does when you breathe on it. No flash, no explosion, no spectacle beyond the thousands of tiny flashes one would expect from the premature detonation of thermal weapons.

She was a good world for a time, but now it was time for us to go elsewhere, and for Earth to fade away into the memory of the stars.